Project Intro
The 33rd Team is a premier football editorial content platform and thought leader in the fantasy football and betting space.
The 33rd Team needed to redesign their website in order to increase speed, engagement, brand awareness, ad revenue, and improve overall functionality and flexibility for their team. CMYK was their #1 draft pick to redesign the site on a blitz-speed timeline before football season kicked off.
highlights
Video content in the form of clips and full interviews with NFL coaches, players, and experts is central to The 33rd Team’s strategy, so we developed a dedicated video hub with integrated playlists to make all of their content more discoverable. We also optimized the viewing experience by developing a custom BrightCove video player UI.
Our addition of a navigation dashboard helped refine the information architecture and optimized content organization and taxonomy. This helps football fans find the resources they need faster, including easy access to every NFL team page and related content. In order to boost engagement, we made smart connections between all content that auto-generates recommendations for follow-up articles and video. We also added a functional sidebar that supports widgets to display the most popular post, related video suggestions, news tracker, and newsletter signup.
Most visitors interact with the site on mobile devices, so we took a mobile-first approach to design that adheres to SEO best practices. We leveraged and expanded on The 33rd Team’s existing brand system by adding textured charcoal backgrounds as wells as the headshots, names, and titles of authors to article bylines to reinforce The 33rd Team’s credibility.
Leveraging our experience building custom editorial sites, we streamlined the editing process for The 33rd’s editorial team by eliminating workflow inefficiencies on the back end, improving existing tools, and creating new formatting tools for building richer layouts using WordPress blocks. This made the site much more flexible and will help it continue to grow, evolve, and adapt to showcase seasonal content throughout the year.
Last but not least, we also enhanced ad strategy and created premium real estate for ads, including opportunities for sponsored widgets, content, and articles in order to attract advertisers and drive revenue from ad sales. Thanks to our help, The 33rd Team saw a significant increase in digital ad impressions after launching the new site.
CMYK’s game plan was to design a site equal in quality to the content The 33rd Team provides, and we didn’t fumble the ball: the redesigned site saw an immediate increase in user activity and earned more in ad revenue than any week prior to launch.
